THE Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is given away by the “pre” because anyone wanting to put painting back to before Raphael needs their head examined.

Wives and Stunners: The Pre-Raphaelites And Their Muses by Henrietta Garnett []

It may have been a reaction against the alarming modernism of Turner whose light-filled spaces gave these Victorians vertigo. Nonetheless the attempt to throw over hundreds of years of pictorial advance was bound to be awkward for the painters concerned: Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt and their later disciples William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

It is however in the nature of artistic movements never to be easy. The Pre-Raphaelites’ great publicist Ruskin had also been the principal advocate of Turner so it’s not surprising that he cracked up and ended his last years staring at water.

The Pre-Raphaelites themselves, haunted by suicide, madness and drug-addiction, produced pictures that were overloaded and stilted but their best work comprises an art more neurotic than anything hitherto.

The Pre-Raphaelites themselves, haunted by suicide, madness and drug-addiction, produced pictures that were overloaded and stilted but their best work comprises an art more neurotic than anything hitherto

The admirers of Turner followed the light and are known as the French Impressionists, whereas admirers of the Pre-Raphaelites were much darker and led to Symbolism, Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession.

They were also London’s first consciously bohemian group and their lives connect to later artistic circles (the Aesthetes, the Souls, Bloomsbury), and here we find a child of Bloomsbury, Henrietta Garnett, producing a book about them.

Her angle is the women in their lives, a very reasonable approach since the greatest Pre-Raphaelite pictures are of women. It is unfortunate that precisely this approach was not long ago taken by Franny Moyle’s Desperate Romantics (2009) which was tied in with a TV series.

Garnett’s is tied in with the new Pre-Raphaelite exhibitions at Tate Britain and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The cast list is no different.

There was Effie Grey who married Ruskin. His ideas of women were derived largely from art and he didn’t recover from the reality of his wedding night.

The marriage was never consummated and after six years of chill Effie went off with Millais.

Georgiana Burne-Jones had it the other way, a good marriage to her painter husband followed by despair when he became infatuated by beauties from London’s Greek community.

Neither Effie nor Georgiana were really muses.

The two who were (Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris) were working-class girls who became Pre-Raphaelite models and the two principal lovers in the life of Rossetti.

It was chiefly through his pictures of them in various guises that the ideas of female beauty were transformed in the second half of the 19th century.

To the pretty, fair and charming was now added the sultry, dark and complicated.

To the whale‑boned and bonneted was now added sheer, clinging drapery and unpinned tresses.

Jane, married to William Morris, was passionate but endured and had an affair with William Scawen Blunt after Morris’s death. Lizzie became addicted to laudanum, gave birth to a stillborn baby and committed suicide at 31.

Although Rossetti had finally married Lizzie he never knew stability either and later suffered from clinical paranoia.

His work is the most original and profound of the Pre-Raphaelites and his death in 1882 marks the end of the drama.

Garnett’s meandering book contributes minor details but neither she nor Franny Moyle have significantly added to the body of work produced by Jan Marsh, whose biography of Rossetti is still the standard.